Obama, don't fear secret racism - the Bradley effect is history

By Sam Wang

Nov 03, 2008 | 4:48 AM

Bored pundits seem to be running out of things to say. For the past month, Obama has led Republican presidential nominee John McCain in national surveys by an average of 7 percentage points. With the first nonwhite President in history and major Democratic gains in congressional races on the horizon, what's left to bloviate about?

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Now they are waving a shiny object at McCain supporters looking for hope and voters looking for drama: the Bradley effect. The name dates back to a California governor's race 26 years ago. Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, a black man, narrowly led in polls against George Deukmejian, a white man - but then lost by a whisker. If something like that happened this year, support for Obama might be overstated.

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The possibility is based on this theory: A little bit of secret racism exists throughout the country - racism that's causing potential voters to tell pollsters they'll vote for Obama, because they're "supposed to," when they secretly plan to back McCain, and that could wind up stealing the fizz from Obama's Election Night champagne.

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But this idea is mostly an urban legend, one that depends more on what we feel in our guts about prejudice than any actual evidence. Let's look at three polling myths, and some truths that the pundits may not know.

Myth No. 1: Whenever there's racism, there's a Bradley effect. An Associated Press survey suggested that up to 6% of votes might possibly be lost by Obama because of his race. But these people are probably already counted in polls. Dan Hopkins, a political scientist, analyzed preelection polls in gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races with one black candidate. He found that until the mid-1990s, the black candidate fell short by about 3 percentage points in actual voting compared with polls. But since then, the gap has disappeared. As in zero.

Where did the Bradley effect go? Nobody really knows why it was there in the first place. People could have been fibbing to pollsters - but there are always reasons to vote for someone besides race, so why lie?

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But here's a different possible reason. Scientists have proved that people often aren't aware of their own hidden prejudices. A handful of people may have thought they'd vote for the black guy, and then realized only when they got to the voting booth that they couldn't do it. But now, decades after the tensions of the civil rights era, it appears that people are finally telling the truth - not only to pollsters, but to themselves.

Myth No. 2: The black guy always gets shafted on Election Day. Our brains tend to remember extreme events, especially if they prove a point we believe is true. But cases that don't fit our views are often forgotten. For example, in the 1989 mayoral primary race in New York City, David Dinkins led Ed Koch by 1 to 5 percentage points in the closing weeks, but he won by a larger margin - 8 percentage points. One thing's for sure: You'll never hear people who argue for a Bradley effect mention David Dinkins.

The myth-makers don't seem to care. They keep talking about it as though it's real.

Myth No. 3: Polls are often wrong. Politicians often say things like, "The only poll that matters is the one on Election Day," or cite the famous wrong prediction in 1948 that Thomas Dewey would beat Harry Truman. But back then, pollsters quit doing surveys a few weeks before the election. Today, dozens of outfits do hundreds of polls, nationally and in all 50 states, right up to election eve. Any one poll can be off.

But an average of all the polls in the last week of the campaign can predict the winner in 98% of state races. If you hear a candidate talk down polls, it might be because he knows he's behind.

All this is not to say that racism is dead. Some people still use race to decide how to vote. But when it comes to opinion poll accuracy, everything's on the table.

Wang, a professor at Princeton, is the author of "Welcome To Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys But Never Forget How To Drive."